Father Seraphim Rose and 20th-Century Orthodoxy

Father Seraphim Rose

The decision of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) to consider the late Father Seraphim Rose as a candidate for canonisation as a saint has sparked off a great deal of controversy online, with some saying what a great saint he was, and some saying that such a great sinner could never be a saint.

I don't want to join that argument; it's not for me to decide, and I know I won't be called upon to make that kind of judgement. But as a missiologist and church historian it think it could be interesting to reflect on his place in mission and church history.

Before the 1960s Orthodoxy was little known among English-speaking people. Orthodox people living in countries where English was widely spoken might build churches, but the services were usually in Greek, Russian, Bulgarian or other non-English languages. After the Russian Revolution some Russian refugees lived in exile in Western Europe and through the ecumenical contacts they made began to make Orthodoxy better-known to a select few in Western denominations, often in academic circles.

One of these exiles was Nicolas Zernov, who influenced an Anglican student, Timothy Ware, who became Orthodox in 1954, and eventually succeeded his mentor as Spalding Professor of Eastern Orthodox Theology at Oxford University. Zernov had already been instrumental in founding the Fellowship of St Alban & St Sergius, which encouraged ecumenical contact between Orthodox and Anglicans.

In the early 1960s both Zernov and Ware wrote books on the Orthodox Christian faith in English. Ware's book The Orthodox Church has been reprinted several times as has Zernov's The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century. Timothy Ware became a monk, taking the monastic name of Kallistos, and later served as a bishop. Through his writings he influenced a growing number of English-speaking people, both in Britain itself and in the Commonwealth.

On the other side of the world, in California, USA, Eugene Rose, who was brought up as a Methodist, later became an atheist and then a student of Chinese religions, became interested in Orthodoxy. His spiritual father was Bishop John (Maximovich) of San Francisco (now better known as St John of Shanghai and San Francisco), who was, like Nicolas Zernov, an exile from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Eugene Rose became Orthodox, and felt called to the monastic life, and with a friend, Gleb Podmoshensky, formed a monastery in Northern California, where Rose, when tonsured, took the monastic name of Seraphim, after St Seraphim of Sarov. There they began publishing a magazine, The Orthodox Word, and also translated and published several Orthodox books in English.

To these two sources of Orthodox literature in English may be added a third. Another group of Russian exiles had set up an Orthodox seminary in Paris for training clergy, mainly for the Russian diaspora. Some of them crossed the Atlantic and set up St Vladimir's Seminary in New York, and St Vladimir's Seminary Press also began publish Orthodox works in English.

From these three, and other sources, flowed an increasing volume of Orthodox literature in English.

In 1966 I went to England to study theology at the University of Durham as an Anglican. Some of the staff and fellow students at St Chad's College were interested in Orthodoxy to some extent, and in 1968 I went on a two week course on Orthodox theology for non-Orthodox theological students, sponsored by the World Council of Churches. It consisted of a week of lectures at Bossey in Switzerland, and Holy Week and Pascha at St Sergius Institute in Paris.

In July 1968 I returned to South Africa, having passed the Diploma in Theology course at Durham, and spent a term at St Paul's College, Grahamstown, where all the other students were busy preparing for their final exams, while I was free to read whatever I liked, and discovered some Orthodox books in the library, including one by Fr Alexander Schmemann of St Vladimir's in New York, called The World as Sacrament, later published in an expanded versions as For the Life of the World. It impressed me a great deal and seemed to provide the answer to some of the biggest problems I found with Western theology. At that stage I hoped that the Anglican Church would grow closer to Orthodoxy, and when, some years later I found that it wasn't, but was actually moving further away, I became Orthodox. The point of this personal excursus is that my movement to Orthodoxy was shaped mostly by the Paris/New York stream, rather than the California and Oxford streams.

It was when our family became Orthodox in 1987 that we were part of a move to start an Orthodox mission society, the Society of St Nicholas of Japan, that I became aware of Father Seraphim Rose. Among the activities of the Society of St Nicholas, was the selling of Orthodox books, mostly in English. We also appealed for literature to give away free and some people sent us back issues of The Orthodox Word. Some asked for his books, which we ordered. We also had some copies of his biography, Not of this World, one copy of which was damaged, so we could not sell it, and I kept it and read it, and was interested to discover that he was in San Francisco at about the time the Beat Generation authors were active there.

From the biography I gathered that Fr Seraphim Rose was critical of the St Vladimir's school that produced Orthodox literature in English in New York. The criticisms weren't very specific, There were some things that he wrote in his books that I was critical of too -- I'll return to those later. But the main point here is that during the 1960s there was a greatly increased production of Orthodox literature in English from three main sources -- Oxford, England; New York, USA; and California, USA,

It seems that the time was ripe for it.

And the timing seems remarkably exact. Bishop Kallistos Ware and Father Seraphim Rose were contemporaries, born within a month of each other in 1934.

What is more, those who were major influences at the time they were becoming Orthodox, Bishop John of San Francisco and Nicolas Zernov, were also close contemporaries, born within two years of each other. Both were exiles from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and both, in their journeys into exile, arrived in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1921, and studied there between 1921 and 1925. Both were part of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, and so must have known each other during that time.

These three streams of Orthodox literature in English had different emphases, which may have had the effect of appealing to a range of different temperaments. The result was, in most English-speaking countries, an increased interest in Orthodoxy, and a growing use of English in Orthodox services.

The "Oxford stream", if I may call it that, appealed especially to academic and ecumenical circles. Zernov began with ecumenical outreach, forming the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius to make contact with Anglicans.

The St Vladimir's/New York stream was mainly concerned earlier immigrant groups who had come from Orthodox countries in Europe and Asia to the USA before the Bolshevik revolution, which had cut off financial support from Moscow, and so was concerned with becoming an American Orthodox Church. The children and grandchildren of the original immigrants were becoming increasingly English speaking. It was concerned to provide clergy for parishes, and was therefore more focused on parish ministry. It was also to some extent academic and ecumenical.

Father Seraphim Rose, once he had become Orthodox, wanted to be a monk, and, with a friend, started a monastery, and so the vision of Orthodoxy that he promoted was largely monastic.

At the risk of over-simplification, then, one could say that the Oxford stream was academic, the New York stream was parochial, and the California stream monastic.

Father Seraphim Rose, or Eugene Rose, as he then was, had a vision of being a missionary, and, with the blessing of Bishop John of San Francisco, formed a missionary brotherhood of St Herman of Alaska with his friend Gleb Podmoshensky and a couple of others. The first thing they did was to open an Orthodox Bookshop. They were offered space on the cathedral premises, but they preferred to have it on a public street nearby. It became a kind of Orthodox information centre. One family that came to them, the Andersons, had been Roman Catholics, and involved with the Catholic Worker movement of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, and they became Orthodox.

Their next project was to start a magazine, The Orthodox Word, and Bishop John chose the title. The aim was to provide English-speaking people sources of the Orthodox Faith, which they did, mainly from monastic sources, interspersed with notes and other articles they themselves wrote.

After the death of Bishop John they felt the call not merely to read about the monastic life, but to live it, so they bought a piece of lonely isolated land near the small village of Platina in northern California, and moved themselves and their printing press to it. A few years later they were tonsured as monks, and Eugene Rose became Seraphim, and he was later ordained as a priest. Fifteen years after moving to Platina, in 1982, Father Seraphim died. By then thousands of people had been influenced by him, either personally, or through publications of the St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood.

After Father Seraphim's death things tended to fall apart, and some of the pieces fell into dubious places. I will not say much about that here, as there is information on it from other sources. The main point here is that Father Seraphim Rose was influential in spreading Orthodoxy among English-speaking people at a time when few of them knew much about it.

Much of the material came from traditional Orthodox sources, and so passed on some important aspects of Orthodox tradition. I have been one of its beneficiaries, and so have several other people I have known.

But there is another side to it as well.

Before he became Orthodox, Eugene Rose came under the influence of several other schools of thought, both religious and secular. Among other things he studied Eastern Religions at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Among his teachers were Alan Watts, a renegade Anglican priest who had become a Zen Buddhist, and Gi-ming Shien, a teacher of Chinese philosophy. He also became particularly interested in the writings of René Guénon, a French philosopher. As his biographer puts it, "For Eugene, he became... a single vantage point from which he could view the myriad fruits of man's immorial search for meaning." And Father Seraphim later wrote, "Guénon was the chief influence on the formation of my own intelectual outlook."

René Guénon (1886-1951) was a French philosopher who developed an ideology of Traditionalism as an antidote to modernity. He was antimodern, and believed that traditional forms of religion, any religion, were better than non-traditional forms. Eventually be became a Muslim.

Orthodoxy regards Holy Tradition as very important, so when Eugene Rose discovered Orthodox Christianity, it appealed to him because it seemed to be the most traditional form of Christianity. But there is a difference between tradition and Traditionalism.

In the modern age, conservatives tend to value tradition, and seek to balance the notion of progress with the value of what has been inherited from the past. Conservatives like to change things slowly and carefully. But to the right of conservatives are Reactionaries, who want to restore the past, the status quo ante, whether that past was real or imagined. Such people are not merely traditional, they are traditionalist. They value tradition for its own sake, and develop traditionalism into an ideology.

Traditions can be good or bad. The English word "tradition" comes from the Latin traditio, meaning to hand over, to deliver. The New Testament Greek word is paradosis. Whether traditions are good or bad depends on what is handed over, to whom, and why. It is good to hand over, or pass on, the gospel of Christ to those who have not heard it. St Paul urges the Thessalonian Christians to "stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle" (2 Thess 2:15).

But handing over Jesus to be crucified was not a good tradition. A person who hands over their country to an enemy is called a "traitor", which also comes from the Latin traditio. During times of persecution Christians who handed over holy things to the police were called traditores.

So "tradition" is not good per se, it is good when something good is handed over to the right people for a good purpose. For the Orthodox, not all tradition is holy tradition. Some traditions are distinctly unholy.

But for traditionalists tradition is something good in itself, and can easily become an idol, and traditionalism becomes an ideology and a form of idolatry.

Other traditionalist philosophers have followed Guénon. Among them are Julius Evola (1890-1974) of Italy and Alexandr Dugin of Russia.

Evola advocated that "differentiated individuals" following the left-hand path use dark violent sexual powers against the modern world. For Evola, these "virile heroes" are both generous and cruel, possess the ability to rule, and commit "Dionysian" acts that might be seen as conventionally immoral. For Evola, the left-hand path embraces violence as a means of transgression (Wikipedia).

Dugin valued the esoteric forms of religion rather than the exoteric. In his youth be belonged to the Yuzhinsky circle, which was part of the Soviet "occult underground" an esoteric counterculture preoccupied with reading and experimenting with Western esoteric and occult literature in conjunction with Eastern religious texts.

Dugin declared that "Traditionalism is not a history of religions, not a philosophy, not a structural sociological analysis. It is more of an ideology or meta-ideology that is totalitarian to a considerable extent and places rather harsh demands before those who accept and profess it".

Father Seraphim Rose did good work in publishing and distributing the works of Orthodox monastic fathers, but in his own writings we should perhaps be careful to see what sort of spectacles he is looking through. It is better to look at traditionalism through Orthodox spectacles than to look at Orthodoxy through traditionalist spectacles.

Bright Saturday: a chaotic, exhausting, exhiliarating holy day

Yesterday was Bright Saturday, probably better known to Western Christians as Easter Saturday, and it was the day we had arranged to have a farewell service for Fr Athanasius Akunda, who was returning to Kenya after 13 years in South Africa, and a kind of mission rally at the same time, at the Monastery of the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Gerhardsville, west of Pretoria.

We had arranged to take Grace and Hellen Malahlela, from our Mamelodi congregation, out to the monastery on Friday evening, to prepare to feed the masses. We had no idea how many people might be coming, so we estimated about 100, and hoped that if 5000 turned up, we'd be able to feed them. So on Friday afternoon we set out shopping. Five bags of potatoes, 2 boxes of tomatoes, one box of beans, carrots and spinach for Africa, etc etc. How would we get it all in the car?

We looked at gas plates, knowing there was only a small electric stove at the monastery, but in the shop we went to, all the ones displayed were ones that had been returned as defective. We were on our way to another shop when Hellen suggested that they cook it at home, where they had all the equipment and knew what they were doing. We still had no idea of how many pots and pans and serving dishes were at the monastery. So we took Grace and Helen home. They'd had their load shedding in the afternoon, so hoped to be able to cook all night.

At 5:50 am we set off to Mamelodi to fetch them, and there were rows of plastic serving dishes, with rice, potato salad, macaroni and tuna salad, spinach and all other kinds of good things. No meat, because though it was Bright Week, when there was no fasting, it was also a monastery, and monks don't eat meat. There were no monks, but Fr Elias had urged that we respect the nature of the once and future monastery by observing the monastic fast.

Then the chaos began. We were trying to get the church ready for the Divine Liturgy while all the time there were frantic phone calls from people who were coming and had got lost. I had just returned to the vestry from dealing with one of those calls and getting vested when Fr Elias started the Liturgy, and it also became apparent that half the St Nicholas Choir, who were supposed to lead the singing, were lost too. Val had been asked to read the Hours and was about to start when the Liturgy started. So I took off my vestments and went out to join the few who were singing, and trying to negotiate their way to the right places in the service books.

Fr Athanasius, the guest of honour, was also not there. His car had broken down, and he had been up half the night repairing it, and it had broken down again in the morning. He was also binging Deacon Pascal Luse, so in the end the service had about five priests, and no deacons. The bishop phoned to say there was an accident on the road and he was delayed, so start without him. Georgia and Azar Jammine arrived in time for the Epistle, which Azar read, and Georgia was able to lead the singing, which immediately improved.

But the lost were found, and the church was filled, and we made a joyful noise to the Lord. I hope he forgave our imperfections.

Brunch followed. It went quite slowly, in a tent that Fr Elias had hired, and those who had eaten were milling around and thinking of leaving while others were still queuing for food,.We decided to split the speechifying, so Fr Elias spoke first to those who had already eaten, and explained the grand vision for the monastery.

The church where we had had the Divine Liturgy, dedicated to St Demetrius, was just the first of many. It had been built in 2003, and was a kind of parish church, where ordinary people would come. The monastic church would be over the wall to the south, where, for the moment, the donkey Mussolini was making his presence heard by occasional braying. There would be a coenobitic monastery, and a number of small sketes, which could represent different Orthodox traditions -- Russian, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, African etc. Over to the west would be a mission, training and retreat centre. And a women's monastery. And somewhere near that would be a seminary.

His Eminence Archbishop Damaskinos added a few words, saying that he was already familiar with the vision, and that things were moving forward to achieve it.

The thing most urgently needed to fulfil this vision is some actual monks. And a kitchen. Start with a properly-equipped kitchen, to feed the 100 before they grow to 5000.

As Fr Elias began to repeat this inside the tent to the second lot of people who by then had just finished eating, I managed to grab some of the delicious food that Grace and Hellen had been up all night cooking. They had truly worked a miracle.

Father Athanasius then gave his farewell address, which reminded me of St Paul's exhortation to the elders of Ephesus at Miletus (Acts 20:15-38).

I think, like St Paul, that he could fairly say that he had been among us for 13 years, and had held nothing back, declaring to us the whole counsel of God, that he served us in humility of mind and taught everything that was profitable. We hope that a better fate awaits him in Nairobi than that which awaited St Paul in Jerusalem, and that those he teaches at the seminary there, as well as those he taught here in South Africa, will heed the advice that St Paul gave to Timothy: And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also (2 Tim 2:2).

Fr Athanasius characteristically exhorted us to love one another, and be caring Christian communities who would see that no child was left without education, that we should care for one another and so show the love of God.

Father Athanasius was asked to come and help when Archbishop August Thamaga of the African Orthodox Episcopal Church, an uncanonical African independent church, asked to be received into canonical Orthodoxy in the Patriarchate of Alexandria. There were no clergy in the Archdiocese of Johannesburg and Pretoria who could teach them in English, so the then bishop, Metropolitan Seraphim, asked Fr Athanasius, then a deacon, who had just completed his studies at Holy Cross Seminary in Brookline, Massachusetts, USA, to come and help. He arrived arrived in May 2002, and was ordained priest a couple of months later.


Fr Athanasius worked first in Soshanguve, where Archbishop Thamaga became first a Reader, and later was ordaned, as Fr Simon Thamaga. Archbishop Seraphim then asked Fr Athanasius to set up a Catechetical School, to train leaders, and two of the students, Simon Shabangu and Deacon Pascal Luse, also attended the farewell service. The Catechetical School closed in 2009, and after that Fr Athanasius was priest in charge of St Nicholas of Japan Church in Brixton, Johannesburg.

South Africa has been in the news laterly in connection with xenophobia, but the turnout at the farewell service shows that a lot of South Africans, from various communities, loved their Kenyan priest, and Deaconb Pascal Luse came as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo. By no means all South Africans are xenophobic and the majority are kind and welcoming.

On the way home we discovered why so many had got lost. There are road works along the M26 from Laudium to Gerhardsville, and for the first time the new section through Erasmia was open to traffic. After that we went on detours and sections of the old road to the Gerhardsville turn-off, and one landmark was a narrow bridge with a stop sign, which we had crossed in the morning. But by the time we returned in the afternoon the new section of the road had been opened, and the narrow bridge had been closed off, so those who came after us might never have seen it, and we were referring them to a non-existent landmark.

Antioch Abouna: The Monastic Call

Antioch Abouna writes about the place of monasticism in an age of secularisation:

Antioch Abouna: The Monastic Call: "In this new setting for monasticism the call of the angelic life has a profound opportunity and challenge. By its very distinctiveness and isolation from worldliness monasticism is presented with a renewed prophetic vocation by its ability to present a transformation of the common life in God. The city is now the desert where the spiritual meadow must bloom.

In short I think that monasticism will help to restore the credibility of Christianity again in the west. Familiarity with innocuous, adaptive heterodoxy, the bourgeoisification of the Christian tradition has bred a certain contempt and hardness of heart toward the gospel in our culture. Only an Orthodox Christian witness that is both radically obedient to God and warm in its love for Him will now make a difference."

Treasures old and new -- synchroblog on new monasticism

I've written quite a bit about "new monasticism" over the last few years, and thought that for this synchroblog I would write about it as the history of an idea, in the sense of my personal experience of the idea.

One could write a history of the idea in general, but that would need a book, perhaps of several volumes, rather than a blog post. So I'll concentrate on the idea of the new monasticism as I've encountered it, through reading, or discussion or trying to live it, or observing other people trying to live it.

The "new monasticism" of the title has gone under several names at various times, and "new monasticism" is probably the least useful, though it does seem to be the one most commonly used right now. Others I've heard are: Christian communities, Christian communes, intentional communities, semi-monastic communities, and there are several more.

What is common to all these is the idea of Christians living in a community wider than the family, often with a particular purpose of mission or ministry.

When I was a university student in 1964, two things got me thinking about such communities. One was getting the Catholic Worker newspaper, which had news of communities associated with the Catholic Worker movement. Another was attending an Anglican lay conference.

I was then an Anglican, and the Anglican Bishop of Natal invited people to attend an annual lay conference, held at a church school during the holidays. The conference was by invitation only, and a person was only ever invited to attend once. I had attended student conferences that ran on a similar format, but this was different. There were people of all ages, social classes and races there; not just students, but workers, teachers, housewives and others. For a few days we followed the rhythm of a community life, sleeping in school dormitories, having meals together, worshipping together. That was not unusual, but some of us began talking about the possibility of doing something like that for a longer period, of having a core community at a place where one could have courses in things like Christian non-violent action, similar to the Catholic worker communities.

It was just a dream or a vision, but it wouldn't go away, and I kept on thinking about it. The following year I visited the Charles Johnson Memotial Hospital at Nqutu in Zululand with some friends. It was an Anglican mission hospital, and the medical superintendent, Dr Anthony Barker, showed us round. Most of the staff lived as a community, not only working, but eating and praying together as well. We were impressed. It felt like a place that would almost be nice to be sick in. There was a community dedicated to a Christian healing ministry. A few years later it was nationalised by the government, and was bureacratised and institutionised, but in the 1960s and early 1970s it was a beacon of hope because of the Christian community at its core.

A few years later an opportunity came to put the vision into practice, and I was myself part of such an experiment in Christian communal living in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We called ourselves the Community of St Simon the Zealot, in Windhoek, Namibia.

Dr Anthony Barker was an indirect influence on this. He spoke at student conferences, and suggested that students, after they graduated, and before going on to make their fortunes, should spend a year or two using their skills to improve the lot of the poor by working in such places as church hospitals. A friend of mine, Dave de Beer, did just that. After graduating with his Bachelor of Commerce degree he went to St Mary's Hospital at Odibo on the Namibia/Angola border as hospital secretary, getting the finances of the hospital in order. He was only there a week when the government withdrew his permit and kicked him out. He stopped in Windhoek on his way home to say goodbye to the bishop, but the bishop urged him to stay, saying that the diocese needed some help with its finances too. Dave stayed.

Over the next couple of months he became aware of the mission opportunities in a town like Windhoek, and wrote a short paper on it, The city: a mission field, in which he outlined a vision of a missional community, living together, with some working in secular jobs, and others in full-time mission service. Some would form a permanent community, but others could join them for a short time. He sent this to several friends for comment. A few months later, having been fired by the Anglican bishop of Natal, I went to join him, and we started the Community of St Simon the Zealot.

The local Anglican bishop, Colin Winter, was quite supportive to start with, and made a house available. We opened a joint building society account in the name of the Community, which we would use for living expenses. Dave worked in the diocesan office, I got a job with the department of water affairs, and after being fired from that, with the local newspaper. In the evenings and at weekends we would lead Bible study groups, services in road workers or mining camps, teach catechism classes and so on. Some students from South Africa came to join us for the summer vac. One had a vac job, and so contributed to the common fund. Two others didn't have jobs, but helped with cleaning the house and cooking.

But a problem arose. Dave and I saw it as important that we should have daily prayers in the community. As it was an Anglican community we thought we should be doing Anglican morning and evening prayer together at the house. But the bishop wanted and expected us to attend services at the cathedral, a couple of miles away. He saw Dave and me as members of his staff, and regarded our desire to pray together as a community as "divisive" and even elitist. We thought that common prayer was essential to the life of a Christian community. The result was that Dave and I went to services at the cathedral, while the rest of the people in the house stayed in bed. It became more like a common lodging house than a community. Our community worship was reduced to agape meals that we held about once a fortnight, usually with a number of people invited from outside as well.

I won't go into the full history of the Community of St Simon the Zealot here, but just mention that as one of the main problems, and we were not the only ones to discover it. In other circumstances too I have discovered that bishops do not understand the needs of communities or monasteries, and the relationship between a community, whether a monastery or some other form of intentional community, and the local church, whether diocese or parish, needs to be carefully worked out.

Among other things we published (together with friends in other places) a magazine called Ikon, and a newsletter, The Pink Press (it was printed on pink duplicating paper). These we exchanged with other publications worldwide through The Cosmic Circuit, which had about 60 participating publications, described as "underground, upground and overground". It was an amazing mixture of what today would be called 'zines, small-press publications usually dedicated to some or other vision of an alternative society. Among them was Communes, published by a neopagan community in Wales, but with news of all kinds of experiments in communal living, religious and secular.

The Community of St Simon the Zealot came to an end in 1972 when Dave de Beer and I were deported from Namibia (along with Bishop Colin Winter and another member of the community, Toni Halberstadt).

A couple of years later I came across the Children of God when I was in Durban North, in the Anglican parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields. They lived in communes which they called "colonies", spread all over the world. They arose from the Jesus freaks of the 1960s, and were led by Dave Berg, who called himself Moses David, or just Mo.

They were fairly typical of the Jesus freaks of the early 1970s. I first encountered them when walking down a street in central Durban, where one of them handed me a copy of their publication New Nation News. He said they were living in a commune in Durban North, not far from where I lived, and so a couple of weeks later I went with a friend to see them there. There were six of them, a married couple with a baby, and four singles. Three were from the USA, the other three South Africans. One of the US ones, Shemaiah, had been at the University of California at Berkeley, where the Jesus freak movement started. They all took biblical names. They were certainly a missional community, and spent their whole time witnessing, out in the streets or on the beach, distributing literature and talking to people. They said time was precious, and though there were lots of good things one could do with one's time, like reading the Bible, witnessing was the best use of time. They lived on donations they received.

We stayed for a meal with them, and they told us more about their life. They gave us lists of Bible verses that they memorised (from the King James version). New Nation News was a monthly publication, and they published a local version, but much of the material was common to all the "Colonies" around the world. They lived on money that was given to them as they went around witnessing. They pooled it, and used it for rent, food, clothes etc. They showed us their handbook, which was not public, but something they just used among themselves, called Revolution for Jesus -- how to DO it. It was exactly the kind of thing I had dreamed of doing at the lay conference ten years previously. In addition to the public literature there were also "Mo letters" from the founder, mostly addressed to the members of the "colonies". The members we met referred enthusiastically to the film Brother Sun, Sister Moon on the life of Francis of Assissi, which they said was what they were trying to achieve.

At the first encounter the Children of God seemed an almost idyllic community. They seemed to have achieved what we had failed to achieve in Namibia. We invited them to speak to our youth groups and Sunday School classes at St Martin's.

But among them too things began to go wrong. Moses David became increasingly authoritarian and erratic, and as time went on, his "Mo letters" of instructions became stranger and stranger. Eventually he came up with the idea of using kinky sex to proselytise (one can hardly call it evangelism). Members of the "colonies" of the Children of God were urged to become "hookers for Jesus" and engage in what they called "flirty fishing". But before they had reached that stage, we had moved from Durban North to Utrecht, and lost touch with them.

There were many hippie communes in that period (the late 1960s and early 1970s). Some, like the Durban colonly of the Children of God, were Christian. Others were secular, others New Age, others Neopagan. Some were Hindu in inspiration, modelled on ashrams in India. The Christian ones were very much like the communities called "new monastic" communities today.

It was also the heyday of the charismatic renewal movement, in which many manifestations of the Holy Spirit that had hitherto been more or less confined to Pentecostals began appearing in non-Pentecostal churches. This movement also gave rise to "intentional communities" of various kinds. One of the better-known ones, through their publications, was the Word of God community in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

There is an indirect Orthodox connection to these in a book written by Michael Harper, describing some of these communities. His book A new way of living is about communities that developed in an Episcopal (Anglican) parish in Texas, USA, though it appears that these communities no longer exist. Michael Harper is now an Orthodox priest in Britain, though he was not Orthodox at the time he wrote the book. The Church of the Redeemer in Houston was typical of many downtown parishes where people had moved away from the neighbourhood of the church to outlying suburbs, but continued to worship there. Poorer people moved into the neighbourhood, but the church was not reaching them. Then when the parish was affected by the charismatic renewal, people started buying houses near the church and moving back into the neighbourhood, living in intentional communities, and having an outreach to their neighbours.

It seems that charismatic intentional communities in Western churches also flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, but then died out. Does all the talk of a "new monasticism" indicate a revival of interest -- or is this just old hippie nostalgia?

A related idea was that of the missiologist Ralph Winter, who spoke of two redemptive structures: the local church and the missionary band, which he called "modality" and "sodality". Bearing in mind that for 1000 years, from about 500-1500 most Christian mission had been monastic, Winter suggested that the missionary band required a special commitment over and above the local church. When Protestants abandoned monasticism in the 16th century, they did virtually no mission, and it was only with the formation of missionary societies in the 18th century that Protestants became active in mission. The missionary societies had a degree of intentionality not found in the local church.

In addition to monks, in the Roman Catholic Church missionary orders developed. Monks devoted themselves primarily to prayer, but the missionary orders were formed for the purpose of mission. When the religious life revived among Anglicans in the 19th century, many of their religious orders too were intentionally devoted to mission. The Kelham fathers even called themselves the Society of the Sacred Mission, incorporating "mission" into their name.

In the Orthodox Church there is no equivalent of the "orders" that one finds in the Roman Catholic Church, or even among the Anglicans, with several monasteries or religious houses grouped together under a common rule and name. Each monastery is more or less independent, with its own abbot (hegumen). A monasetry may start daughter monasteries, but eventually these will become independent. But there are also Brotherhoods that gather people from different places for a particular task, and the tasks of these brotherhoods may include mission. They are not monastic, but they do reflect Ralph Winter's "sodality" structure.

The Orthodox brotherhoods and Protestant missionary societies do not necessarily have the feature of communal living that one finds in the Christian communes or "new monasticism", but they do share the characteristic of intentionality. People decide to join them to identify with their purposes. Community living takes the idea one stage further.

My own view is that whether one calls this urban monasticism or new monasticism or anything else, at least in the Orthodox world it needs a solid foundation in traditional Orthodox monasticism.

Would someone like Moses David have gone off the rails (and derailed the entire "Children of God" movement) if he had had an Orthodox spiritual father from a traditional monastery? The trouble was that he was trying to be "spiritual father" to hundreds of "colonies" of the Children of God thoughout the world, but he had no spiritual father of his own. In Orthodox monasticism spiritual fathers (and mothers) are not on their own. There have been some charismatic intentional communities, including some in South Africa, where the leaders have become quite abusive. Dave Berg is by no means the only one.

Eventually people in the charismatic renewal movement realised that something was missing. Some of them gave a name to it; they called it "covering", or "discipleship". But who was to cover the coverers, or disciple the disciplers? The maverick authoritarian leaders didn't take too kindly to coming under authority themselves, and I suspect that that played a role in the "charismatic burn-out" of the 1980s.

But the answer has been there all along in traditional Orthodox monasticism. And some Protestants discovered this answer. Fr Jack Sparks, editor of Right on, one of the Christian underground magazines of the 1970s, published by the Christian World Liberation Front, came to Orthodoxy. Not that Orthodox monasticism is idyllic either -- Fr Ephrem, a monk of Simopetra monastery on the Holy Mountain, said that more people go to hell from monasteries than from anywhere else. But at least Orthodox monasticism is aware of the dangers, and has had over a thousand years of experience, and teaches about the dangers of losing one's nipsis (watchfulness).

So I think a new monasticism or an urban monasticism might be a good idea, but it needs to be backed by traditional monasticism is it is to develop in a healthy way.

_____________

This post is part of a synchroblog on the new monasticism.

Here are the other contributions to this month's synchroblog:

Phil Wyman at Square No More: SynchroBlog on Neo-Monasticism
Beth at Until Translucent
Adam Gonnerman at Igneous Quill
Jonathan Brink at JonathanBrink.com
Sally Coleman at Eternal Echoes
Bryan Riley at at Charis Shalom
Cobus van Wyngaard at My Contemplations
Mike Bursell at Mike's Musings
David Fisher at Cosmic Collisions
Alan Knox at The Assembling of the Church
Sam Norton at Elizaphanian
Erin Word at Decompressing Faith
Sonja Andrews at Calacirian

To see what others are saying or have said about the new monasticism, click on the Technorati tag here: new monasticism.

Abandoned places of empire

In the Emergent Africa blog Carl Brook wonders about one of the twelve marks of a new monasticism, which is relocation to the abandoned places of empire.

What does it mean, and what does "empire" mean in that context?

I suppose the simplest thing might be to ask the people who created the "new monasticism" web site what they meant by it, and how they understood the phrase. But it might be more fun to let one's imagination run loose, because it evokes all kinds of romantic images, for all sorts of people. For example, some people have a fascination with the abandoned places of the Soviet empire. I saw many such places in Albania a few years ago, most notably the abandoned steel works at Elbasan, and the hundreds of abandoned concrete bunkers on the hillsides, monuments to the war psychosis of Enver Hoxha, where it could be said that the Orthodox Church has indeed relocated to the abandoned places of empire.

Another image that it evokes is the book From the holy mountain : a journey among the Christians of the Middle East by William Dalrymple. Dalrymple is a journalist and travel writer, and his journey follows in the footsteps of two monastic pilgrims centuries earlier. Western Christians are fond of talking about "The Constantinian Era", but often fail to realise that for many Christians the "Constantinian era" lasted less than 300 years, and ended in the 7th century. In AD 578 John Moschos and a companion set off on a similar journey, to monasteries of the Near and Middle East. Dalrymple follows them, but few of the monasteries they visited still exist. They are among the "abandoned places of empire".

There is also a fictional recording of an attempt to relocate to the "abandoned places of empire" in Rose Macaulay's novel The towers of Trebizond.

These are just a few of the images evoked by the phrase "abandoned places of empire". And perhaps everyone will have their own images so that there can be many more.

When linked with monasticism, it might be given another twist, and it could be understood as being places outside the ekoumene -- the wild and uninhabited places of the earth. The early monks left the cities and went to the deserts, and lived in caves and ruins, which could likewise be seen as abandoned places of empire. Could a neo-monastic community take root in the ruins of the steelworks at Elbasan?

But the phrase can also be seen to have a metaphorical sense. Abandoned places, not just in the sense of being uninhabited, but, from a Christian point of view, being culturally alienated from the Christian faith, and perhaps abandoned by the Church. At least one Christian writer sees it as referring to the inner city, which has often been abandoned by the Church. There is an example in Johannesburg, where the Orthodox Cathedral of SS Constantine and Helen (diagonally opposite the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King) has a congregation that has relocated to the outer suburbs, and commutes to the church on Sundays almost to a foreign country. Around the church are the inner-city suburbs of Joubert Park, Hillbrow, Doornfontein and Bertrams, cosmopolitan, with a high proportion of illegal immigrants, many of whom earn their living through crime, while others are poor and exploited. The church was built by immigrants of an earlier generation, whose grandchildren have prospered and moved to places of green lawns and swimming pools (and often gated communities, ghettoes surrounded by electric fences, like medieval castles).

Perhaps another book, written by another Orthodox priest (though before he was Orthodox), could give a hint of how to minister in such a situation. The book is A new way of living by Father Michael Harper, and describes how an Episcopalian parish in Houston, Texas developed urban Christian communities as members of the church began a reverse migration from the outer suburbs to the inner city to form urban communities. This too could be seen as relocating to the abandoned places of empire.

But if the Christian Church has physically abandoned geographical areas of cities, there is also a kind of cultural abandonment. A conservative blog for peace gives an example of reality TV shows, where sometimes the reality gets too real.

One of the first of these "reality" TV shows was Big Brother. There was a great deal of media hype about Big Brother before the first series here, and it struck me that the very concept was immoral. It was not "reality" -- it was a public experiment on live human beings, encouraging manipulation of others for public entertainment.

I'd like to have seen the result of introducing a hesychast monk into that setup.

But even if one had applied they would probably have been rejected, because the producers of such shows are not looking for people who reject the values of the virtual reality they are trying to create for voyeurist entertainment. But why not?

In the ancient world, the equivalent of reality TV was the gladiatorial games, where gladiators fought wild animals or each other for the entertainment of the public. But they didn't seem to object to having unarmed Christians facing the wild animals, on occasion.

Do reality TV shows create or reflect the values of our societies and cultures? And which aspects of culture constitute the abandoned places of empire?

From communist youth to Orthodox monks

Most of us have read in the newspapers and seen graphic images on television of the violence and destruction of the Wars of the Yugoslav succession, when Yugoslavia tore itself apart (often with outside assistance) during the 1990s.

But even in the midst of the destruction, there were signs of hope, as some, at least, pursued more preaceful ideals. Among these is a new generation of Orthodox monks. They grew up under the communist system, indoctrinated at school with atheism, and now have turned to a life of prayer and repentance.

There is much talk nowadays, especially in "emerging church" circles, about a "new monasticism", but in the former Yugoslavia the youth have opted for a restoration of the old monasticism.

And now the man who has been at the centre of the monastic revival in Serbia, His Grace Artemije, Bishop of Raska and Prizren, will be visiting South Africa, and will speak on the topic Orthodox monasticism, and the revival of the monastic life in Serbia after communism at St Thomas's Orthodox Church, Sunninghill Park, Gauteng on Saturday 5th May 2007 at 5:00 pm. If anyone is interested in attending, you will find more information here. Anyone who is interested in Christian monasticism, new or old, is welcome to attend.

How to get there

From Johannesburg, Pretoria, East Rand, West Rand, take the N1 freeway to the Rivonia Road offramp, then turn North towards Leeukop prison. About 2km from the freeway exit the road narrows, and just before it narrows there is a turn-off to the right, and almost immediately one turns to the left, then right again, and the entrance to the church parking is just round the corner. There will be a sign that says "Church Parking" at the gate.

If you have any questions, please use the comment form below.

Orthodoxy as Boutique Religion?

The Scrivener: Orthodoxy as Boutique Religion? writes entertainingly about about a view of Western converts to Orthodoxy, which sometimes turns out to be conversion to a subculture.

Orthodox Monk writes about Pentecostalism and the Orthodox Tradition of the Philokalia.

I was unable to comment on their posts in their blogs, so I thought I would combine my comments on both into a new post, though it might make more sense if you read their posts first.

Orthodox Monk says

We really are out of our depth. We really know nothing about Pentecostalism and it would require a degree in religious doctrine and sociology to sort out the different currents in Pentecostalism...

We do know that none of the Elders of the Orthodox Church has ever endorsed Pentecostalism. That is important for there are clearly charismatic elements in the Orthodox tradition of the Philokalia: an Orthodox Elder is normally revealed to the body of the Church through his gifts of clairvoyance.

And he goes on to compare reports of different kinds of Pentecostal and charismatic worship, including the Toronto Blessing, and worship in an American neopentecostal church.

I may be able to help in some ways, as I have had some experience of Pentecostal and charismatic worship, mainly in an Anglican setting, though also among traditional Pentecostals such as the Assemblies of God, and also among neopentecostals. Before I became Orthodox I was in the Anglican Diocese of Zululand, where a charismatic renewal movement started in the 1940s, propagated by the Iviyo loFakazi bakaKristu (Legion of Witnesses of Christ).

In the 1970s the charismatic renewal movement swept Western denominations, including Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians and others. It also gave rise to new denominations, called "neopentecostal" to distinguish them from traditional Pentecostal denominations. This happened not only in South Africa, but it was a worldwide phenomenon. In South Africa it led to the dramatic growth of a community of Anglican nuns, the Community of the Holy Name, especially in Zululand. It led to a new ecumenism -- a Pentecostal choir singing in the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Durban and a new optimism in the face of the intractable problems of apartheid and oppression and racial divisions. The South African Defence force was pitted against the liberation armies, and the charismatics proclaimed "Jesus has not come to take sides but to take over."

The founders of the Iviyo movement, Bishop Alpheus Zulu and Canon Philip Mbatha, were not, as "Orthodox Monk" implies, demonised. They were the nearest thing to Orthodox spiritual elders I found in the Anglican Church, men of wisdom and spiritual discernment. Many young men in Zululand went to the sisters of the Community of the Holy Name as I saw young people in Bulgaria visit sisters in an Orthodox monastery outside Sofia, for spiritual counsel and advice.

But not all involved in the Western charismatic renewal were as disciplined as those involved in Iviyo. There were plenty of spiritual "lone rangers", who wandered around convinced that the new teaching revealed to them must be heard, and supersede all others. Some came up with fanciful theories of the revival of apostolic ministries, and proclaimed themselves to be the embodiment of that revival, claiming that they were the new apostles.

At Iviyo conferences, on the other hand, while there may have been 2000 people yelling and jumping and praying in tongues, there would be, out of sight, in the crypt of the church, or a school classroom, a group of about 20, mostly priests and nuns, praying all the time. If anyone claimed to have a revelation from God to give to the main meeting, they had first to take it to those who were praying, who might say that no, that was not a revelation from God, but a spiritual delusion (for which Orthodox Christian have a technical term, plani or prelest.

Some American charismatic leaders were aware of the dangers of this lack of discipline, and to counteract it, people like Derek Prince and others started the "shepherding movement" but this in turn led to excesses in the opposite direction.

In the Orthodox Church, the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit never ceased to operate, but they were always exercised under the guidance of clairvoyant spiritual elders who were themselves guided by their own spiritual fathers. This meant that there were not wild swings between the individualism of the freelance spiritual lone rangers and the authoritarianism of the shepherding movement. And it is this that constitutes the main difference between the charismatic elements of the Orthodox tradition, and those found in the Pentecostal movement in the West.

Those who have been involved in Western Pentecostalism and the charismatic renewal movement can often appreciate Orthodoxy when they see it. One of the leaders of the Anglican charismatic renewal in England, Canon Michael Harper, is now the Dean of the Antiochian Orthodox Deanery in the UK. I have taken Pentecostal friends to Orthodox services and they have appreciated them more than other Protestants who are hung up on "the word". Pentecostal/charismatic worship tends, like Orthodox worship, to go beyond merely "hearing the word".

Older Protestant hymns did sometimes mention experience, but tended, especially in the 19th century, to be individualistic and introspective, describing the feelings of the author of the hymn rather than praising God. By singing them, the worshippers might get ideas about how they ought to feel, but it was not really worship.

Back in the 1960s I once organised a service, led by an ecumenical group in an Anglican church, that included many of the elements that "Orthodox Monk" describes as demonic -- loud music, flashing lights, dancing, etc. One result was that the Anglican bishop of Natal fired me as an Anglican deacon. Another was that the bishop preached in the church soon afterwards, and told the congregation that their church had been profaned (and this appeared on the front page of the local newspaper the following day). A third result was that I and the other Anglican members of the group that had led the service, feeling that we had been excommunicated from the Anglican Church, went to the Divine Liturgy at the local Orthodox Church, where we were received sympathetically by the priest, who said, in effect, that the Anglican Bishop of Natal was an old square. I might have become Orthodox then and there, had not another Anglican bishop asked me to go and work for him, so my conversion to Orthodxy was delayed by 15 years.

My point is this: that many things in the Pentecostal/charismatic movement are things that Orthodoxy has had all along, but which had been neglected in Western Christianity. The Pentecostal/charismatic movement was in some ways a correction of the imbalance, though it has tended to become unbalanced the other way. Now that I am Orthodox, I would not be at all tempted to organise a "psychedelic service" in an Orthodox Church, because Orthodox worship does not have the deficiencies of much Western Protestant worship that makes people feel the need for that. Where there are deficiencies (from a human point of view) in Orthodox worship, they can be corrected not by scrapping it and replacing it with something else, but by restoring it.

What about The Scrivener: Orthodoxy as Boutique Religion??

This is a response to The Sarabite: Towards an Aesthetic Christianity: Western "Eastern Orthodoxy" as Boutique Religion, who says, among other things, that "If anything, it is for the most part an exotic spirituality that ignores the patrimony of the Western Church and seeks to replace the struggles at the heart of Christianity with escapism."

I presume that the problem to which it is not the answer is "the struggles at the heart of Christianity". And the Sarabite concludes with "Not taking this in its most integrist reading, we can say that the West does not need Eastern Orthodoxy to restore it. It can surely help, but the West itself has all that is necessary for the restoration of the Church." And that is a kind of "tu quoque" argument that needs to be taken seriously. One of the great complaints of the Orthodox in the Second World in the early 1990s was that they did not need Western Christians to come and help them restore Christianity in the East after several decades of state-sponsored atheism. Yet many Orthodox Christians in the West appear to believe that Orthodoxy is needed to rescue the West from the forces of secularism and modernity, in a kind of postmodern restoration of premodernity. But that is perhaps a matter for another debate.

For me, however, the question was slightly different. A senior Anglican priest in South Africa, Walter Goodall, writing about the drift of Anglicanism away from the historic Christian faith, said that the solution would be for Anglicans to join the Roman Catholic Church, since the Pope of Rome "is, after all, the Patriarch of the West".

I wrote to him pointing out that South Africa was part of Africa, and that therefore in South Africa Anglicans with such concerns should rather look to the Pope of Alexandria, who is, after all, the Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa.

Boutique religion? I don't think so. Orthodoxy has been African since the first century.

Orthodox youth conference and monastic tonsure

The weekend of 7-10 December was a historic occasion for Orthodoxy in Southern Africa, with the first diocesan youth conference for the Archdiocese of Johannesburg and Pretoria, and the first monastic tonsuring of a South African monk to take place in South Africa, when the novice Brother Matthew was tonsured as the Monk Seraphim, and was ordained deacon.

Full report, with pictures, at:

http://methodius.livejournal.com/59807.html



The newly-tonsured Hierodeacon Seraphim with His Beatitude Theodoros II, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa

Orthodoxy and premodern and postmodern thinking

Bishop Seraphim Sigrist recently posted some notes for a paper he read on Christianity and Society in the Christianity and Society discussion forum, and has now posted a report on the retreat where he read the paper. The retreat was held at a Coptic centre, and his report is illustrated with some Coptic ikons of the desert saints and led to some interesting discussion in which Bishop Seraphim referred to a piece written by William Dalrymple on the role of miracles among Coptic Christians, and especially among the monks of the desert today.

I think this piece by Dalrymple is from his book From the Holy Mountain, in which he compares Near and Middle Eastern Christianity today with what it was like shortly before the Muslim conquest in the 7th century.

What it brings out most clearly are some of the characteristics of the premodern worldview. Compared with Western Christianity Orthodoxy is generally premodern, but in Coptic monks this can be seen in a particularly pure form.

What is interesting is to compare this approach to miracles to that of Western Fundamentalism, because the latter is clearly imbued with moderniity, and even modernism. The Western Fundamentalist approach to miracles seems to be that miracles are important because they are thought to prove some doctrinal or ideological point. Miracles have been taken up into a system of rational argumentation, and this approach is characteristic of the modern worldview. Read almost any theological discussion in Usenet newsgroups, for example alt.religion.christian and you will see that even when Christian fundamentalists are arguing with atheists, both presuppose the same modernist worldview.

I became acutely aware of this in discussions with some Calvinistic Baptists in Durban some thirty years ago. It was apparent that to them the resurrection of Christ was an important "fact", because it was in the Bible. But it did not seem to be a significant fact. It was merely a kind of adjunct to the importance of the Bible and so another matter for rational argument and prooftexting. If one said to them "Christ is risen and the angels rejoice, Christ is risen and Hell was angered for it was mocked" they saw no cause for rejoicing but went scurrying to find proof texts to show that such rejoicing was unseemly and that it wasn't so.

Compare this view with that of the Coptic monks, for whom rational argument occupies a much lower place in the scale of priorities. Miracles are not there to "prove" anything about anything, they are just there to enjoy the commuinion of saints and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

Notes from underground: A Youth of the Apocalypse

Several months ago I wrote about the Death to the world e-zine here Notes from underground: A Youth of the Apocalypse

Now someone has given me a new link where you can find Death to the World: the last true rebellion on line.

Since I wrote the original, there have also been some new developments in South African monasticism.

Technorati tags: Orthodox monasticism, fools for Christ, new monasticism, punx to monks, Death to the World, Youth of the Apocalypse.

Urban monasticism

Someone created this forum/web meeting place for people interested in urban monasticism. It seems to be for people of any religion or tradition who are interested in different kinds of semi-monastic life.

I've been interested in such things for a long time, and at one time, with some friends, formed the Community of St Simon the Zealot in Windhoek, Namibia. Not true monasticism, but at a time when the idea of communes was quite popular, we hoped it might be a semi-monastic or "intentional community".

I thought of an Orthodox example, Mother Maria Skobtsova, and wonder if there are any others.

Thinking about it a bit more, I think that if any Orthodox Christians wanted to do such a thing, they should be within range of a full "proper" monastery, which they should visit regularly.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this suchject, or know of any examples? If so, please comment, either here or on the urban monasticism site.

Technorati tags: Orthodox monasticism, urban monasticism

St Tikhon's Monastery

St Tikhon's Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, USA, has a new web site.

If one is interested in monasteries and monasticism it's worth a look.

Little Gidding : Monasticism Anyone?

In my other blog I posted an item about the first steps to estalishing an Orthodox monastery in Southern Africa. Then i came across this.

Little Gidding : Monasticism Anyone?

It seems that there is a lot of interest in monasticism nowadays. One of te best brief introductions I've found on the web, however, is Orthodox monasticism. But that doesn't answer the questions about Protestant monasticism.

I'm familiar with a number of Anglican religious orders -- the Community of the Resurrection, the Community of the Holy Name, and a few others, and I'm interested in finding our more about one in Zimbabwe, the Community of the Holy Fire.

And then there's Orthodox Monk: Vows of the Tonsure to the Great Schema